The researchers started with 86,000 subjects who had filled out the 100-question personality profile – and this, of course, was done as another app on Facebook – and whose personality scores had been matched by algorithms with their Facebook likes. They then found 17,000 who were willing to have a friend or family member take the personality test on their behalf, trying to predict the answers they would give.

The results, from most humans, were stunningly inaccurate. Friends, family and co-workers were all less able to predict how someone would fill out a personality test than the algorithms that had been primed with the subject’s Facebook likes. With only 10 likes to work on, the computer was more accurate than a work colleague would be. With 150 likes, it described the subject’s personality better than a parent or sibling could. And with 300 likes to work on, it was more accurate than a spouse.

The discovery was made by blogger Keith Ng who wrote on his On Point blog (http://publicaddress.net/onpoint/ich-bin-ein-cyberpunk/) that the Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) requested assistance from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the country's signals intelligence unit, which is charge of surveilling the Pacific region under the Five-Eyes agreement.

A list of so-called selectors or search terms were provided to GCSB by the police [PDF, redacted] for the surveillance of emails and other data traffic generated by Dotcom and his Megaupload associates.

'Selectors' is the term used for the National Security Agency (NSA) XKEYSCORE categorisation system that Australia and New Zealand contribute to and which was leaked by Edward Snowden as part of his series of PRISM revelations.

Some "selectors of interest" have been redacted out, but others such as Kim Dotcom's email addresses, the mail proxy server used for some of the accounts and websites, remain in the documents.

So to recap; police investigating an entirely non-terrorism-related criminal case in NZ was given access to live surveillance traffic for surveillance of an NZ citizen. Scary stuff

“Those demanding the Snoopers’ Charter seem to have been indulging in out-of-control snooping even without it – exploiting legal loopholes and help from Uncle Sam.
“No-one suggests a completely unpoliced internet but those in power cannot swap targeted investigations for endless monitoring of the entire globe.”

Go Liberty! Take note, ICCL, this is how a civil liberties group engages with internet issues.

Reports this week revealed that the US successfully pressed the European Commission to drop sections of the Data Protection Regulation that would, as the Financial Times explains, “have nullified any US request for technology and telecoms companies to hand over data on EU citizens.

The article [...] would have prohibited transfers of personal information to a third country under a legal request, for example the one used by the NSA for their PRISM programme, unless “expressly authorized by an international agreement or provided for by mutual legal assistance treaties or approved by a supervisory authority.”

The Article was deleted from the draft Regulation proper, which was published shortly afterwards in January 2012. The reports suggest this was due to intense pressure from the US. Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding favoured keeping the the clause, but other Commissioners seemingly did not grasp the significance of the article.

Unintended consequences on US-focused governance of the internet and cloud computing:

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue. We can't fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don't see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

Maciej Ceglowski with a strongly-argued rebuttal of David Simon's post about the NSA's PRISM. This point in particular is key:

The point is, you don't need human investigators to find leads, you can have the algorithms do it [based on the call graph or network of who-calls-who]. They will find people of interest, assemble the watch lists, and flag whomever you like for further tracking. And since the number of actual terrorists is very, very, very small, the output of these algorithms will consist overwhelmingly of false positives.

Matthew Prince of CloudFlare has an interesting theory on the NSA's capabilities:

It is not inconceivable that the NSA has data centers full of specialized hardware optimized for SSL key breaking. According to data shared with us from a survey of SSL keys used by various websites, the majority of web companies were using 1024-bit SSL ciphers and RSA-based encryption through 2012. Given enough specialized hardware, it is within the realm of possibility that the NSA could within a reasonable period of time reverse engineer 1024-bit SSL keys for certain web companies. If they'd been recording the traffic to these web companies, they could then use the broken key to go back and decrypt all the transactions.

While this seems like a compelling theory, ultimately, we remain skeptical this is how the PRISM program described in the slides actually works. Cracking 1024-bit keys would be a big deal and likely involve some cutting-edge cryptography and computational power, even for the NSA. The largest SSL key that is known to have been broken to date is 768 bits long. While that was 4 years ago, and the NSA undoubtedly has some of the best cryptographers in the world, it's still a considerable distance from 768 bits to 1024 bits -- especially given the slide suggests Microsoft's key would have to had been broken back in 2007.

Moreover, the slide showing the dates on which "collection began" for various companies also puts the cost of the program at $20M/year. That may sound like a lot of money, but it is not for an undertaking like this. Just the power necessary to run the server farm needed to break a 1024-bit key would likely cost in excess of $20M/year. While the NSA may have broken 1024-bit SSL keys as part of some other program, if the slide is accurate and complete, we think it's highly unlikely they did so as part of the PRISM program. A not particularly glamorous alternative theory is that the NSA didn't break the SSL key but instead just cajoled rogue employees at firms with access to the private keys -- whether the companies themselves, partners they'd shared the keys with, or the certificate authorities who issued the keys in the first place -- to turn them over. That very well may be possible on a budget of $20M/year.

[....]
Google is a notable anomaly. The company uses a 1024-bit key, but, unlike all the other companies listed above, rather than using a default cipher suite based on the RSA encryption algorithm, they instead prefer the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (ECDHE) cipher suites. Without going into the technical details, a key difference of ECDHE is that they use a different private key for each user's session. This means that if the NSA, or anyone else, is recording encrypted traffic, they cannot break one private key and read all historical transactions with Google. The NSA would have to break the private key generated for each session, which, in Google's case, is unique to each user and regenerated for each user at least every 28-hours.

While ECDHE arguably already puts Google at the head of the pack for web transaction security, to further augment security Google has publicly announced that they will be increasing their key length to 2048-bit by the end of 2013. Assuming the company continues to prefer the ECDHE cipher suites, this will put Google at the cutting edge of web transaction security.

2048-bit ECDHE sounds like the way to go, and CloudFlare now support that too.

The spam presidency. As European citizens are made the miserable targets of unimpeded “direct marketing”, that may be how Ireland’s stint in the EU presidency seat is recalled for years to come.
Under the guiding hand of Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, the Council of the European Union has submitted proposals for amendments to a proposed new data protection regulation, all of which overwhelmingly favour business and big organisations, not citizens.
The most obviously repugnant and surprising element in the amendments is a watering down of existing protections for EU citizens against the willy-nilly marketing Americans are forced to endure. In the US there are few meaningful restrictions on what businesses can do with people’s personal information when pitching products and services at them.
In the EU, this has always been strictly controlled; information gathered for one purpose cannot be used by a business to sell whatever it wants – unless you have opted in to receive such solicitations. This means you are not constantly bombarded by emails and junk mail, nor do you get non-stop phone calls from telemarketers.
Under the proposed amendments to the draft data protection regulation, direct marketing would become a legal form of data processing. In effect, this would legitimise spam email, junk print mail and marketing calls. This unexpected provision signals just how successful powerful corporate lobbyists have been in convincing ministers that business matters more than privacy or giving citizens reasonable control over their personal information.
Far worse is contained in other amendments, which in effect turn the original draft of the regulation upside down.

Fantastic article from Karlin Lillington in today's Times on the terrible amendments proposed for the EU's data protection law.

'The biggest leak in the history of US security or nothing to worry about? A breach of trust and a data protection issue or a necessary secret project to protect American interests? [Tomorrow] lunchtime Science Gallery Rapid Response event [sic] will pick through the jargon, examine the minutiae of the National Security Agency's PRISM project and the whistle blower Edward Snowden's revelations, and discuss what it means for you and everyone. And we'll look at the bigger picture too. Journalist Una Mullally will chair a panel of guests on the story that everyone is talking about. '